Accent/phonology in simultaneous bilinguals

[Katie Alcock]

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any papers on phonological processing in simultaneous bilinguals, especially those whose exposure to each language is from native speakers (rather than those growing up in a bilingual environment with a lot of non-native speakers in one or both languages).

I'm asking because my two nieces (British father who is the main carer, Spanish mother) have noticeably non-British accents when speaking English, as well as some non-native phonology (e.g. b/v confusion, smaller range of vowels than I'd expect).

Almost no-one who is a non-native English speaker speaks English to them (except for a small amount in simple English lessons at school - they are 5 and 7). They do hear English of a variety of accents, but all their Spanish family and friends speak Castellano with them. I'd estimate they get about 75% exposure to Spanish, perhaps a little more (and more for the younger girl who gets more input from her older sister than vice versa).

At least for the older girl, comprehension is at an age-appropriate level; she makes some non-native-like sentence-level errors but they are not too dissimilar to a slightly younger monolingual (he/she confusion, question word order problems). I'm not sure about perception of contrasts but this is one of the more noticeable things about her production.

I'm very curious about accent in children in this kind of context; the data from infants would lead us to assume that once contrasts have been acquired in perception, so long as some exposure continues, they are not lost and by implication should also be present in production. Perhaps this is one of those assumptions that has no basis in fact!

Thanks

Katie Alcock




Katie Alcock, DPhil, CPsychol
Lecturer
Department of Psychology
Lancaster University
Fylde College
Lancaster
LA1 5EB
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 593833

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